“... right to asylum from Germany’s basic law. In Belgium, the debate brought down the government of Charles Michel. Meanwhile, parties such as Denmark’s Social Democrats have learned to outdo the right in anti-immigrant policy proposals – which include stripping asylum seekers of jewellery and quarantining them, Australian-style, on a barren island in the ...”

“... modern man of late 19th-century fiction – a contemporary of Paul Montague and a predecessor of Charles Gould. The ‘delinquents, vagabonds’ and ‘mercenaries’ with whom he signs up to fight for the Dutch are another, brutal expression of this modernity: ‘true “moderns”’, Steinmetz suspects, among whom Rimbaud can pass incognito, in a world ...”

“... the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No ...”

“... brief toehold in the Restoration repertoire, because it can be made to speak to the adventures of Charles II. In much the same way, Henry V offers itself as a vehicle for the mediation of wartime trauma. In our own century, Olivier’s film addresses the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944 and – perhaps more obliquely – Kenneth Branagh’s film engages ...”

“... all round the country, and the entertainer who had been spirited away somewhere between King’s Cross and Leeds had swarms of aspiring sound-alikes as far as the BBC transmitters could reach. The story of his disappearance made headlines in the national papers the following day. Posters went up in shop windows, and Peter Brough offered a reward of ...”

“... puts it, ‘a highly visible expert on tyranny, liberty and slavery.’ In the Wheatley home on King Street, she had a front-row view of protests against the Stamp Act, whose repeal she celebrated in a poem. While her early works declare loyalty to the paternal King George, she later used parent-child metaphors to depict ...”

“... of refrigerators. He’s blasting with warmth out back.Mason & Dixon is the story of two men, Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79). Both are drawn from history, as is the outline of their doings, and as are many of the acquaintances they happen upon en route. Mason begins the tale as an astronomer at Greenwich; Dixon as a journeyman ...”

“... citadel, vaunt and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means knight wanderer, but I also think it means knight who has made a mistake. Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human ...”

“... the Muslim armies profited from the unpopul-arity of the ruling Visigoths. In July, Tarik defeated King Roderic, and the local population flocked to join the army that had rid them of an oppressive ruler. By the autumn, Córdoba and Toledo had both fallen. As it became clear that Tarik was determined to take the whole peninsula, an envious Musa bin Nusayr left ...”

“... sat there and smoked, but, when I sat on the lavatory, and put my legs up on the stool, I was a king, King Canute, or a great prince, though also a bard. The stories I told myself were of tournaments, and of knightly encounters in which the combatants were represented by the tassels at either end of my dressing-gown ...”

“... and Antichrist. Collinson thought this was true only of extremists, those who were radicalised by Charles I’s religious policy in the 1630s, and that puritanism was initially and essentially a movement for reform within the Church of England. As a result, his work neglected the ‘Separatists’ – pissing-in rebels against orthodoxy – whom ...”

“... terseness of Spartan diplomacy plenty of ammunition for his own campaign against garrulity. When King Philip II of Macedon sought to intimidate the Spartan leadership by declaring that ‘If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out,’ their reply was a simple ‘If’. The laconic riposte is a pivot or judo throw that makes use of an opponent’s superior ...”

“... two were fated to be mated. As the courtier, roving fixer and tireless mouthpiece for the Burger King of Palm Beach, Giuliani would relinquish all shame, honour, dignity, self-respect and semblance of continence. According to Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, he stank up the bathroom on one of ...”

“... for some time now that Bligh was not the celluloid brute portrayed by tyrannical, lashing Charles Laughton and Trevor Howard, and Kennedy takes the process of rehabilitation a credible stage further, though his comparison of Bligh with Mother Teresa is a stage too far for me. His book amply demonstrates, to anyone who still believes in the Hollywood ...”

“... better written and more imaginative works on Chanel. There are a few mistakes: Edward VII was not king in 1914, and the mystifying Ballets de Monaco must mean the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo. Besides its stumbling prose and unserious tone, this book’s other fault is an absence of sufficient pictures. The reader interested in the subject must seek out ...”